"3G" is a crock. Here's why. (Also, it kicked my puppy.) | Hacker News Reader

"3G" is a crock. Here's why. (Also, it kicked my puppy.)

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64 pointskeithwinstein15 comments

4G on my new Sprint HTC EVO is a joke. It sucks down on the battery like a thirsty yak and it has terrible indoor reception. Not to mention it doesn't seem noticeably faster than 3G.

So I use the 3G radio 99.9% of the time and the 4G radio sits there idle because someone in Sprint's marketing team though it would give them an edge in marketing the device.

I'd put money on the table and say that if Dan Hesse himself carries around an HTC EVO he has the 4G turned OFF.

"How's that for a wireless revolution... Pretty awesome huh?"

This G thing has been getting out of hand for quite a while now. A friend was recently telling me how much better his new phone was because it is 4G. He said he didn't really know what that meant, but it was definitely faster than 3G.

Also, a coworker of mine refers to his company provided Nextel Blackberry as "half-G".

It's just a marketing term for marketing to people who don't care about link protocols or multiplexing strategies. The problem was originally started when 1xRTT and EDGE were branded as 3G. This should have never happened, but that's what happens when marketing drives your business instead of engineering.

Honestly, even EVDO isn't really a true 3G protocol, as voice and data are completely separate protocols. UMTS phones don't drop to a voice-only technology to make a call, they use the data signaling, and IP connectivity isn't lost during phone calls. However, the fact that CDMA folks decided to go with a less ambitious, but easier to deploy megabit+ broadband technology meant they were able to beat the GSM networks to the punch. Worse is better.

That being said, WiMAX and LTE are legitimate 4G technologies. They both step up to using OFDMA instead of CDMA, which gives them a much higher theoretical bandwidth ceiling. Yes, HSPA+ networks have been pushing into WiMAX's bandwidth territory by adding MIMO and 64QAM modulation, but that's pretty much the ceiling for HSPA. The only future it has is in multi-carrier or multi-tower arrangements, which don't increase the spectral efficiency and are pointless in dense urban areas.

Technically WiMAX and LTE are not 4G technologies. LTE-Advanced is to be.

There seems to be a few mistakes.

First, partially it sounds like a branding problem. It would be interesting to know where/how it happens: is it just an American thing? At least in Europe I've not really heard of anything of the sort. Sure they may rebrand 3G as "High Speed" and 3.5G as "Super high speed" but that's about it. At least they don't change a term they have already been using. I guess here we are also "lucky" that the protocol is displayed much more prominently.

Second point I think the comparison with wirelines didn't convince me too much: 3G/4G/whatever are more like DSL/ISDN/Cable. They can't simply advertise the bandwidth, because you actually need to have the right piece of hardware. Imagine if they sold you a "1MB/sec" connection but it didn't work: "Oh, I am sorry dear customer, but you need to have a UMTS phone for that". I'd be really pissed at that point. :)

Edit: actually another such case is Flash format. You get SD, SDHC, SDXC, for example. It's important they advertise that because that's what may decide if you can read or not the card you just bought. Then sure, they also advertise that the card is 8GB, 16GB or what have you, but you can't remove the information on the protocol.

The best wireless internet experience I ever had was from a sailboat in a little bay in Colombia. There was a cell tower up on a hill, servicing a half dozen houses and as many boats on the water. At any given time you could be reasonably certain you had the whole thing to yourself.

I don't think you'll ever have it that good in New York City, nomatter how fast your phone and how much money the carriers throw into infrastructure.

It took a while but the guy makes a great point towards the end. Cell phone companies have sold an idea of the service that you will get but never give you the specifics of how it will be. For instance the new 4G network is coming. We know it's fast or should be but have they given a list of the speeds that you will expect while using this new 4G service or simply the idea that it will be fast so use it?

I think they aren't marketing the details like you expect because to most people it doesn't matter. Most people wouldn't know the difference if it had 1mg download or 1mbs or 10mbs (though they'll understand that the second is faster).

This is the marketing difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple says 'it's faster' and you believe them. Microsoft says 'it's 64bit and can run 192gb of ram, which makes it blindingly fast.', but the second only means something to a small percentage of customers, and the message that gets through is Apple's 'it's faster'.

While you do have a good point, it's more than that. They don't market the details so that they do not have to live up to them.

Aren't you begging the question here?

Sprint: http://shop.sprint.com/en/stores/popups/4G_coverage_popup.sh...

I couldn't find anything official on AT&T's, Verizon's, or T-Mobile's sites.

Tell me you got a new phone where you pay to get 1 Mbps and 100 ms rtt to major exchange points. When the market moves forward enough to make that a reality, that’ll be a generation worth celebrating.

It's not quite 100 ms, but not too shabby:

   --- svt.se ping statistics ---
   21 packets transmitted, 21 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
   round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 86.396/133.311/257.719/44.787 ms

According to another test app I'm getting 1Mbps down and 130kbps up. Time to celebrate my iPhone?

I think I was getting better speeds before switching to another operator, too. (And the bandwidth test app seems to agree, it classified my result as merely "acceptable" and not "good").

My RTT is similar here in Alexandria, VA on T-mobile. Of course, my N900 usually shows 3.5G instead of 3G. Having not paid much attention, it's not clear to me what that means in real speed terms.

That 3.5G is HSPA+ which has a max downstream of 21 megabit versus 3G (HSDPA) at about 7 megabit down.

Correction suggestion: "3G" in the United States is a crock. So is "4G", which as far as I understand is not actually even LTE/WiMax in some places (which themselves are pre-4G).

.eu side, at least, things are a bit clearer.

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